GameDay used to feel like college football waking up.
Now it feels like ESPN waking everybody else up so we can watch its employees enjoy being famous.
And College GameDay may be coming to Knoxville for Tennessee–Texas.
The message board took the news exactly as you’d expect: as an opportunity to hate ESPN harder.
“People still watch that show?”
That was essentially the welcome mat.
There was a time when GameDay arriving in Knoxville meant something. The set. The signs. Lee Corso putting on a mascot head. Herbstreit pretending he had not spent the previous six days hearing from Tennessee fans on social media.
Now the show can announce it is coming to town and half the board reacts like somebody said Comcast needs access to the crawlspace.
Pat McAfee came up almost immediately.
“The Pat McAfee hate keeps growing online.”
“As it should. He’s a bum.”
Nothing had happened yet.
No desk had been assembled. No guest picker announced. Nobody had screamed into a microphone wearing a tank top.
The board was already tired of him.
Nick Saban fared slightly better, which on this particular message board is roughly equivalent to surviving a parole hearing.
Then came the broader ESPN review.
“show is way to long”
“Anyone that watches anything on ESPN other than the actual games has mental issues.”
That second man belongs in a museum.
He pays for a television package built largely around ESPN so he can watch ESPN broadcast Tennessee football, then regards the other people watching ESPN as evidence of societal collapse.
And this is where GameDay now sits with a lot of college-football fans. The show is still huge. The spectacle is still real. Knoxville will still fill up if ESPN brings the circus to Tennessee–Texas.
But ESPN has somehow become the relative everybody invites because the party would feel strange without him, then complains about while he is still standing in the kitchen.
The board will watch.
Of course it will watch.
Then it will spend three hours explaining why nobody watches anymore.
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